Performance Comparisons of IP Problem Formulation

Sammanfattning: When solving optimization problems, the importance of speed can not be emphasized enough for many organizations. One company encountered a major performance difference when solving a problem with the same integer programming solver, in two different locations. The difference was shown not to be caused by the environment of the solver, but rather a reformulation of the problem. However, the reformulation did not improve the performance of an expanded version of the problem. By analyzing and comparing the two versions one might be able to find the properties  of a problem which enables the reformulation to reduce the solving time. This in turn can be used to identify for which problems the reformulation should be applied to increase the speed at which they are solved.